arXiv:2601. 21996v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Mechanistic Interpretability has identified interpretable circuits in LLMs, their causal origins in training data remain elusive.
By Jianhui Chen, Yuzhang Luo, Liangming Pan
arXiv:2606. 12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata.
By Leon Bergen, Usha Bhalla, Sidharth Baskaran, Max Loeffler, Raphael Sarfati, Dhruvil Gala, Ryan Panwar, Santiago Aranguri, Thomas Fel, Atticus Geiger, Matthew Kowal, Siddharth Boppana, Daniel Balsam, Owen Lewis, Jack Merullo, Thomas McGrath, Ekdeep Singh Lubana
arXiv:2605. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that require nuanced ethical reasoning, yet existing bias evaluations treat model outputs as simply "biased" or "unbiased.
By Yash Aggarwal, Atmika Gorti, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Manas Gaur
arXiv:2608. 03201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety guards are widely used to filter harmful content and are typically trained via supervised fine-tuning on labeled prompt-response pairs.
By Yu Feng, Chunting Zang, Chen Shen, Rui Miao, Ge Teng, Weidong Cai, Jieping Ye
arXiv:2608. 10537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have helped uncover mechanistic explanations for LLM behaviours such as reasoning, jailbreaking etc.
By Chuqiao Lin, Shivaji Sondhi, Xiao-Liang Qi
Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy.
arXiv:2606. 03885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Feature attribution methods explain predictions by assigning importance scores to input features.
By Kieran A. Murphy, Shameen Shrestha
arXiv:2607. 01033v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model organisms (MOs) - language models trained to exhibit undesired or unnatural behaviours - are frequently used as testbeds for evaluating white-box interpretability techniques.
By Andrzej Szablewski, Gabriel Konar-Steenberg, Raffaello Fornasiere, Nikita Menon, Stefan Heimersheim
arXiv:2604. 23130v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks expose a persistent failure mode in safety-aligned LLMs: models can be pushed into harmful behavior, but the internal representations enabling this shift remain poorly localized.
By Nilanjana Das, Mathew Dawit, Aman Chadha, Manas Gaur
arXiv:2607. 13162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: What a language model will and will not do is largely set during post-training, but which behaviors it expresses, hides, or resists is not revealed by prompting alone.
By Winston Zeng, Ali Emami, Jinho Choi
arXiv:2606. 32008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability (MI) requires full access to model internals, yet the APIs for most widely deployed language models at best expose log-probabilities over output tokens.
By Philippe Chlenski, Zachariah Carmichael, Ayush Warikoo, Chia-Tse Shao, Yingxiao Ye, Aobo Yang, Vivek Miglani, Nehal Bandi
arXiv:2604. 26866v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) acquire most of their factual knowledge during the pre-training stage, through next token prediction.
By Dimitris Dimakopoulos, Shay B. Cohen, Ioannis Konstas